Posted: April 2nd, 2013 | Author: admin | Filed under: Uncategorized | No Comments »
Chris Daley’s nonfiction students have published personal essays in Salon, The Rumpus, Guru Magazine, and Eclectica and memoirs workshopped in her class have won a PEN Emerging Voices fellowship and an award from the Los Angeles Book Festival. So, it’s no wonder Chris’s students keep coming back for more!
This Spring, Chris is teaching Nonfiction II, which you can check out on our Classes page and/or sign up for by emailing writingworkshopsla@gmail.com.
We asked Chris a few questions about reading, writing and teaching and loved reading her answers:
Your students are incredibly passionate about your classes and often take your workshops on back-to-back seasons. What is it like to watch your students grow in this way?
When I stop to think about how hard these students have worked – some for over two years now – it’s awe-inspiring. I have two classes that are closed to new enrollment, because the students are so committed to their projects that they keep coming back. Some of these writers have families, some have full-time jobs, and all have lives outside of class. Yet they show up every week with the reading done and the written homework complete, and on top of that, they submit new work for their projects every other week, read each other’s submissions, and provide generous and insightful feedback. Their discipline and love of writing never fail to inspire me, and I think we are all fortunate to have found each other.
What’s been both fun and challenging for me is keeping the class fresh each term with the same students returning. In December, we had our first public reading at Bar Covell in Los Feliz, which came about from the fall curriculum. In addition to our regular assignments, we focused on selecting appropriate excerpts and practicing performance. The event was a huge success. In the winter term that just ended, we focused on submission and publication. We analyzed print and online venues for nonfiction, read a couple issues of literary journals and some submission advice from editors, and kept track of deadlines for upcoming calls and contests. Now I’m trying to figure out what’s next!
You are a professional editor as well as a professional writer. What do you bring from your editing background into a workshop environment? What do you bring from your own history of writing?
I’ve never thought about how my class might be influenced by my editing work. I know submissions are professionally edited for the price of admission, but I think there’s a more subtle effect. The students come to consider style and substance at the sentence level to be as important as larger craft concerns. I believe this is how writers of memoir especially will distinguish themselves. Often, when discussing memoir, the focus is on the story, the angle, but readers want beautiful, compelling prose regardless of genre.
I’ve written personal narrative in the past – and I’ve taught essay writing for almost twenty years (yikes!) – but right now, I’m moving from work on a linked story collection to a project that would likely be described as narrative journalism. These choices weren’t related to my teaching, but I’m glad in a way to be working on a different genre than the students. For me, the teaching feels more…pure, maybe. In class, I’m able to concentrate fully on the students’ work and leave my own writing concerns… I’d say at the door, but the classes are at my house so I’m already inside.
The most important link between my writing and my teaching is a belief that audience is the most important consideration for a writer. That’s the beauty of the workshop environment, especially when you’ve found a cohesive class that stays together from term to term. You have an available, intelligent audience that can be honest with you about what’s working and what’s not.
What’s the best personal essay you read this week?
I’m being completely sincere when I say that on an average week, the best essay I read is almost always written by one of my intermediate or advanced students.
However, we’re on break right now, so I’m reading a stack of novels for a panel I’m moderating at the LA Times Festival of Books on April 20. Once I’m finished, I’m looking forward to reading a few essay collections, including Katie Roiphe’s In Praise of Messy Lives, Daniel Mendelsohn’s Waiting for the Barbarians, and Jo Ann Beard’s The Boys of My Youth. For a recent class, we read David Foster Wallace’s A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again and we were all madly in love by the end. The next craft book I’ll be reading is the new Phillip Lopate, To Show and To Tell: The Craft of Literary Nonfiction.
Do you have a writing outfit? A Lucky hat? An especially comfortable shirt? Or are you more of a writing snack kind of woman?
I don’t have a lucky anything. I’m more of a skill kind of girl. I tend to dress up just because I’m used to teaching at universities. The only ritual I have for the class is that at the end of every term, we always have a potluck finale. It’s a nice way to bond and celebrate as well as share some homemade cooking. Or at least treats from Trader Joe’s.
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